Russian economy restored to two-thirds of pre-crisis level

Photo ITAR-TASS

MOSCOW, January 18 (Itar-Tass) – Russian economy has been restored to two-thirds of its pre-crisis level, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin says in a documentary that the Rossiya One television channel aired early morning Wednesday.

“We’ve restored our economy to two-thirds of the pre-crisis level, with the exchange rate of the ruble getting stabilized and foreign exchange/gold reserves growing,” Putin says in the ‘Crisis 2008: Russia to be Rescued’ documentary.

“On the whole, we’ve spent 3 trillion rubles /USD 1=RUB 31.6 at the current exchange rate/ for anti-crisis measures,” he says. “That’s really a huge sum but it did pay back and did so with a profit.”

“What really mattered was a number of things of a fundamental nature” and they occurred in the economy over the past few years, Putin says.

One of them is the fact that many companies working in the real sector of the economy stopped taking huge loans in the West during the crisis and had to start implementing novel technologies, optimizing their personnel and retraining workers.

Putin also mentions preparations for a possible second wave of the economic crisis, although “this one may never come in reality.”

“I’ve long issued an instruction to have all the calculations in place on a possible emergence of a /problematic/ situation of some kind,” he says. “We’re considering draft laws and government resolutions just in case” that will be kept on the shelf until the moment a need to enact them arises.

“Russia is a country the stability of which isn’t called into question,” Putin says. “We have enough resources – natural, intellectual and industrial – to reduce the aftermaths of any global upheavals to the minimum.”